How do Social Media and SEO Connect?

Most businesses that have a website are aware of the term SEO. Search engine optimization works to improve search engine rankings and get more people on your page. Social media is also a term that almost everyone is familiar with these days. Social media encompasses any online tool such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and more. These websites all have one similarity; they aim to connect users by uploading, commenting or liking shared content. When we talk about SEO for social media, we are talking about combining the two and using social media to improve search engine results to yield higher rankings online.

Over the years, these techniques and practices have changed and evolved. Today’s SEO landscape puts much more value on social media and “social signals” when indexing and ranking a page.

What are Social Signals?

A social signal can be considered the word of mouth for the digital age. Social signals consist of shares, likes, comments, pins, votes or views that come from your various social media pages. These social media pages are connected to your brand and filter information to search engines. While the specific algorithm that search engines use to index pages is not known by anyone, it is widely agreed upon that search engines identify and utilize your social signals when indexing your pages. Even though it’s not known exactly what degree of value is placed on the use of social signals, search engines compare likes and shares to be recommendations from consumers on the trustworthiness, relevance, and quality of your brand.

Social signals are crucial when discussing social SEO since it’s these likes, shares, and comments that are seen by search engines and in the end, help you rank higher and, therefore, get more potential views and customers to your page.

How to Use Social Signals

Since social signals are the likes, follows, mentions, comments and other interactions on your social media pages, there are a few specific ways you can improve the signals on your page, some tips include:

Create compelling and relevant content that is appropriate for your brand, which readers would want to share with others in their social media circles.

Ensure your social media accounts are clean, easy to read and easy to navigate. Making sharing on your page simplified will increase the number of shares you get.

Create a schedule for posting and stick to it. Posting regularly increases visibility and provides more opportunities to engage with readers.

Communicate with your audience through social media, reply to comments and engage with the reader.

Share content on your pages from other relevant sources.

By taking into consideration these tips, your social media pages will flourish, you will gain more likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter and your website and content will be shared through the social media accounts of others, providing you with a wider audience and more brand awareness and recognition. With these positive social signals, you will improve your social media SEO and get better rankings in search engines.

Other ways Social Signals Impact SEO Rankings

While traditional SEO places a lot of value on things like backlinks, anchor text links, and keywords, updates to the way search engines index pages are shifting the focus away from these factors and making quality content on a page a more valuable resource for determining the rankings. Further updates include social media in the mix of factors that contribute to a site’s rankings as consumer’s input, and opinions add more value to the brand’s online presence. Proper social signals can do many things for a website, such as reducing the bounce rate, keeping users on the site for longer, and create more repeat traffic. Social signals or social shares SEO can also positively impact other pages in the same domain while improving the overall ranking of the site.

Other ways social signals and SEO in social media can impact your online presence include:

Potential to Improve Linking: By posting often about your brand or product on social media, you are giving more people the opportunity to share your content and create more brand awareness and increased brand exposure. Although each individual tweet or Facebook share doesn’t directly contribute, by reaching a wider audience, there is more potential to have users link to your content or website.

Personalized Results: Social media allows for users to recommend, rate or review businesses or products online. Many search engines and social media sites allow for personalized search results within your group of friends. For example, Facebook may show you pages that your friends have liked. Google+ also shows businesses that have received a review or +1 from your friends when that particular friend is signed in. Although these tactics do not offer guaranteed results, they do help to improve the overall brand awareness of your product.

Co-Citation: Even getting mentioned by a user on a social media site without a link to your website or tagging is also thought to help with social media SEO. This is called co-citation and often helps in building conversation and buzz around a brand or product.

Increased Search Queries: The more your brand is online; the more people will be searching for it on search engines. If your brand or product is Googled often, it will come across as more reputable, popular and trustworthy. Google places a lot of clout in the number of queries your brand has and will rank you higher the more people search for you.

Volume and Engagement: A beautiful website and relevant content is a great start to building a website that users can engage in, but how are they reaching your site and how long are they staying on it? By blogging regularly or linking to relevant and interesting content on your site, you can ensure that people who are viewing your website stay on it for longer. For example, if someone reaches your website from a link you posted of a blog post on Facebook, they may read the blog and then decide to stay on your site for longer to check out the other content or blog posts. This is why creating interesting and relevant content is so valuable.

Profile Ranking: Sharing content and building your social media pages will not only lead to your website ranking higher, but it may also lead to your social media profiles ranking highly as well. Ideally, a brand wants to be the first organic search result during a query or brand search, but if they are producing quality social signals and social SEO, their social media accounts will also be in the top search results. This leads to greater exposure and a wider audience reach for your brand or product.

Authorship: Verified online profiles that show authority or expertise on a subject or product will also have an impact on social media rankings. This means that certain accounts of people who are relevant to certain topics, or have larger audiences will have higher rankings, making it more vital also to bulk up personal social media accounts to stay relevant.

Our social SEO expertise can help your business grow. Contact us today to learn what we can do for you.

Are Followers Important?

Look on the social media of any business or brand you admire. Chances are, they have a lot of unique followers or likes on their pages. Accumulating many followers is vital for a business to come across as reputable and trustworthy. A page with only 100 likes will certainly not be as highly regarded as a page with thousands of likes. However, it’s also important to stay away from programs or accounts that will promise you more followers without actually doing anything.

These claims are usually scams and the followers that come with are spam accounts. Being followed by numerous spam accounts is detrimental to your online reputation. By implementing a solid and strategic social media SEO plan that is unique to your business, and by regularly creating captivating and fresh content, you can grow your followers and likes, increasing your brand awareness and improving SEO rankings.

How Social Media Platforms Handle Content Differently

As a business, you have your website and several social media accounts designed to promote and optimize your brand or product. When the time comes to promote your content on your various social media platforms, should the same information go on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or Instagram?

The answer is a resounding NO. While promoting your content on all platforms is highly encouraged, each platform has specific methods to get the best results. For example, Twitter posts are best kept succinct and to-the-point. Highlighting brief bits of information is effective in Twitter’s 140-character limitation. Facebook, on the other hand, responds better to a conversational tone that comes across as friendly and relatable. When posting on LinkedIn, content should be presented professionally while Google+ and Instagram should feature captivating visuals that will stand out to readers.

By always thinking about the platform you are utilizing, you can make sure you are capitalizing on the best features of each site, ensuring you get the most exposure, likes, comments, and shares and therefore taking advantage of the benefits of social SEO.

How can a Social Media and SEO Marketing Company Work for You?

Listing off tips and tricks on how to make the most out of social media marketing with your own business is easy, implementing those tips and continuously making an effort to produce meaningful social signals on your social media pages is the hard part. A social media and SEO marketing agency will help define your unique goals and content needs and research what your competitors do to create and implement a social media plan for your business from start to finish.

From coming up with ideas and building content strategies that will get you noticed, to creating social media contests and coupons that will engage your customer and invite new sales, letting an agency with experience take care of your social SEO is the best way to ensure the best ROI at the end of the day.

Social SEO by Lead to Conversion

Lead to Conversionprovides comprehensive and innovative SEO and social media marketing. With our industry-leading services, we can help you rank higher in search engines, improve your social media following and drive the traffic to your website. Our social media and SEO marketing plans can help turn online visitors into paying customers.

Our social media services include:

Profile creation and optimization

Campaign strategy

Content Creation

Targeted Facebook Ads

Contests and coupons

Building a social media following

Reputation Management

Driving website traffic

Reporting

Our team of experts is with you every step of the way, from designing a social media plan that is unique to your industry and business, to implementing that plan and getting results. With a strong social media and SEO strategy, you will see a return on investment in no time.

Contact us or call 855-473-6582 today for a free consultation and let us show you how your business can benefit from SEO for social media.

Free Consultation

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